The President’s Export Council

It is an exciting thing to further President Obama’s strategy to increase exports to support good-paying American jobs. Today, at the White House the President named important leaders of the business and labor community to the President’s Export Council, a group that will provide critical recommendations for the National Export Initiative. James McNerney, Chairman, President and CEO of The Boeing Company will serve as Chair and Ursula Burns, CEO of Xerox Corporation will serve as Vice Chair.

Over the past couple months, ITA has been working hard to help American companies export more – from increasing our advocacy on behalf of U.S. businesses to leading a record number of trade missions overseas. Additionally, the Trade Promotion Coordinating Committee has been developing strategies that will double exports in five years to support two million jobs.

Across the federal government, work is underway to improve coordination and maximize efforts to help American businesses take advantage of the increasing opportunities in the global marketplace. The leaders who were named to the PEC today will offer invaluable insight to how America can grow its exports to the same degree as other countries.

As the President said today, “This isn’t just about where jobs are today; this is where American jobs will be tomorrow. Ninety-five percent of the world’s customers and fastest growing markets are beyond our borders. So if we want to find new growth streams, if we want to find new markets and new opportunity, we’ve got to compete for those new customers -– because other nations are competing for those new customers.”

At the end of the day, increasing trade means increasing jobs for the American people.

And there is not anything more exciting than that.

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12 comments

Mr. Sanchez,

I am glad that your were chosen to lead the ITA, and I look forward to reading about how the US Foreign-Trade Zone program has contributed to promoting exports and keeping US jobs and industry from becoming offshore operations.

Im a member of the National Association of Foreign-Trade Zones, and have seeing what the FTZ program has done to level the playing field for US based manufacturers and exporters. I do hope you will take the time to understand the program’s benefits and work with industry to expand its use and effectiveness for US companies. Thank you for allowing me to comment.

I suppose like any business, a country also has to keep a ‘supply & demand’ mentality, if you get aggressive and promote more exports, the customers are gonna have a wider choice of products. It’s a smart proactive approach.

Any country’s economy I think should be handled like a business, too much borrowing leads to problems, like the recent the drop in credit rating for America. If it were looked at a profit / loss situation that would have been avoided I think…

For approximately 12 years I had the pleasure to serve on your trade policy ISAC/ITAC representing small business as well as on the staffs of Senator Baucus and the House Small Business Committee under Chairman Manzullo.

I direct your attention to my noted Internet site (http://www.intl-trade-desk.org)on which the House Hearing on Trade Promotion & Coordination was conducted on July 26, 2006. This hearing findings documented the urgent need for President Obama’s current trade initiative.

April 26, 2006 U.S. House Small Business Committee Hearing documented the dysfunctional operations of the U.S. trade facilitation efforts, a lacking U.S. National Export Strategy, and impediments to implementing Free Trade Agreements with the reduction of the U.S. trade deficit. Chairman Donald A. Manzullo’s opening remarks summarized the issues and highlighted the corrective legislation that was introduced that day, H.R. 5196.

Chairman Manzullo noted that with the U.S. trade deficit in goods and services running approximately $65 billion or more per month, so far in 2006, the U.S. is well on its way to break the 2005 record annual trade deficit of $724 billion. So far this year, through the end of February, the accumulated U.S. trade deficit with China, alone, is somewhat worse, totaling $31.75 billion, up $2.63 billion from the same period in 2005.

Equally threatening is the U.S. dependence on the inflow of foreign capital to finance these deficits through the purchase of Federal debt instruments, which in turn lend support for a strong dollar that continues this deficit to debt cycle.

Congress, in the Export Enhancement Act of 1992, established the Trade Promotion Coordinating Committee (TPCC) with two main purposes:

–Providing a unifying framework to coordinate the export promotion and export financing activities of the U.S. Government; and

–Assess the appropriate levels and allocation of resources among agencies in support of export promotion and export financing and provide recommendations to the President…and

–Coordinate official trade promotion efforts to ensure better delivery of services to U.S. businesses.

Over the past 14 years, TPCC has had mixed results in fulfilling its Congressional mandates. Without clear budgetary influence or a strong will to exert oversight authority of the numerous federal entities that make up its members, currently totaling 21, the TPCC’s impact on unifying the diverse U.S. trade promotion and finance operations has been negligible.

Building on the adverse findings from the Hearing, seven Inspectors General were engaged to undertake specific federal department reviews of the identified shortcomings.

I regret the long introduction but thought it deserved highlighting.

I do hope you will be able to devote the needed resources to make the President’s new initiative work and finally produce a real National Export Strategy that has never before been developed or implemented in a coordinated manner. I will be following your progress with interest.

Thank you for all your hard work in trying to implement President Obama’s National Export Initiative. Please be advised that a lot of small exporting businesses in the U.S. still do not have access to the US export grants funding because of a lot of bottlenecks. Your grants funds access requirements for small businesses need to be reasonable, practical and timely in order to meet President’s goals or else the allocated funds will just seat there or end up going to the same conglomrates which consume them in overhead cost and never made it outside the U.S. markets to truely fight Chinese and Japanese competition to US products. I am still looking for grants funds for my small minority exporting business. Thanks again and God bless the United States of America.

I am truly glad to see that the president is focusing on exporting. The more jobs Americans can have the opportunity to have in my book is crucial to our economic growth. We are still recovering from the banking mistakes our county has made in the past. So every little bit to grow businesses is a step in the right direction for all small business owners.

Finding new means to export our goods is a very intriguing action. Sadly, we depend heavily on imports, especially from china and that’s one of the reasons why they are growing so big. It’s time we shake up the system a bit because i cringe every time our big companies move their headquarters outside. Once we have a good flow of exports in place we’ll start seeing our national unemployment rate go down to respectable levels.